Commerce—the marketing, buying, selling, and exchanging of products and services between two or more entities—has been around since the beginning of humankind. From its origins in local face-to-face transactions to 21st century global ecommerce, commerce continues to evolve. As ecommerce becomes increasingly sophisticated, and marketing and transaction channels that were once clearly distinct become more and more integrated, the distinction between offline and online commerce is disappearing.
The ecommerce systems have attracted large numbers of users, thereby generating large and varied product listings of both new and used products. However, such ecommerce systems commonly suffer from an inability to efficiently convert buyers into prospective sellers. Typically, sellers supply descriptions and images of the products they are selling. The task of generating ecommerce listings can be cumbersome, particularly for small merchants and non-merchant individuals.
That is, current ecommerce marketplace or sites and system supporting such sites and marketplaces are designed for products to be sold once to an end consumer. These ecommerce systems are not designed to handle where the products change hands many times over the life of the product. Typically, when an item is sold, the listing disappears and the item is no longer available for sale until the buyer (i.e., prospective seller) re-lists the item in the ecommerce site using the standard procedure of listing an item. The prospective buyers cannot view any listing associated with a sold item or any ownership history associated with that item. Certain ecommerce system providers have attempted to address this problem by providing their buyers with access to a list of items they bought on their ecommerce site or marketplace. The buyers can select to re-list a particular item from their purchase history list with the same ecommerce system provider. These ecommerce systems alleviate the prospective sellers from having to re-type the item descriptions and uploading images, but the prospective seller must go through the standard process of listing the item with the ecommerce system provider. That is, the ecommerce system does not differentiate between a newly listed and a re-listed item.
Today there are numerous multi-module e-commerce systems and providers offering technology, methods and services to enable a buyer and seller to transact in a multitude of ways, locally and globally, across multiple online and offline channels. Even with all of the sophistication, current e-commerce systems are designed for a product to be sold once; they have not been designed for a product to be bought and sold multiple times throughout a product's life. Current ecommerce systems suffer from an inability to efficiently, effortlessly and seamlessly transform the most recent buyer (current owner) of a product into a seller of the product.
Typically, when an item is listed on the ecommerce site for sale, the terms of that listing are binding on the seller. That is, if the buyer agrees to the terms on the listing, the seller must sell the item to the buyer. Similarly, if the item is listed for an auction, the seller must sell the item to the winning or the highest bidder. Accordingly, it may be desirable for a prospective seller to list the item to gauge interest in the marketplace for a particular item before actually listing the item for sale. For example, the prospective seller can use such information to determine the appropriate listing price when he/she decides to list the item for sale.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an efficient system and method which seamlessly transforms the most recent buyer (current owner) of a product into the seller of the product, and to enable the buying and selling of a product multiple times throughout the life of the product.